CHAPTER XXXIII

A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)

A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by begging the question: it
defines Progress as the development and economy of Forces. Further, it defines force as anything
that does, or helps to do work. Man is a force; so is the sun; so is a mathematical point, though
without dimensions or known existence.

Man commonly begs the question again taking for granted that he captures the forces. A dynamic
theory, assigning attractive force to opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass, takes for
granted that the forces of nature capture man. The sum of force attracts: the feeble atom or
molecule called man is attracted; he suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the forces that
attract him; his body and his thought are alike their product; the movement of the forces controls
the progress of his mind, since he can know nothing but the motions which impinge on his senses,
whose sum makes education.

For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a spider in its web, watching for chance
prey. Forces of nature dance like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them when it can;
but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory of force is sound. The spider-mind acquires a
faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting
together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of
analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute
sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running
water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals
helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands

A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 475

merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses
and grains were academies of study. With little or no effort on his part, all these forces formed his
thought, induced his action, and even shaped his figure.

Long before history began, his education was complete, for the record could not have been
started until he had been taught to record. The universe that had formed him took shape in his
mind as a reflection of his own unity, containing all forces except himself. Either separately, or in
groups, or as a whole, these forces never ceased to act on him, enlarging his mind as they
enlarged the surface foliage of a vegetable, and the mind needed only to respond, as the forests
did, to these attractions. Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius; selection
between them is the highest science; their mass is the highest educator. Man always made, and
still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap,
but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and
worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no
longer give to force a name.

Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other forces as he assimilated food. He
called it the love of power. He felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow
or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sough fetish or a planet in the world beyond. He
cared little to know its immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he could
conceive to have possible value in this or any other existence. He waited for the object to teach
him its use, or want of use, and the process was slow. He may have gone on for hundreds of
thousands of years, waiting for Nature to tell him her secrets; and, to his rivals among the
monkeys, Nature has taught no more than at their start; but certain lines of force were capable of
acting on individual apes, and mechanically selecting types of race or sources of variation. The
individual that responded or reacted to lines of

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new force then was possibly the same individual that reacts on it now, and his conception of the
unity seems never to have changed in spite of the increasing diversity of forces; but the theory of
variation is an affair of other science than history, and matters nothing to dynamics. The individual
or the race would be educated on the same lines of illusion, which, according to Arthur Balfour,
had not essentially varied down to the year 1900.

To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine, and for its control he invented the
science called Religion, a word which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force whether
in detail or mass. Unable to define Force as a unity, man symbolized it and pursued it, both in
himself, and in the infinite, as phiIosophy and theology; the mind is itself the subtlest of all known
forces, and its self-introspection necessarily created a science wh.ch had the singular value of
lifting his education, at the start, to the finest, subtlest, and broadest training both in analysis and
synthesis, so that, if language is a test, he must have reached his highest powers early in his
history; while the mere motive remained as simple an appetite for power as the tribal greed which
led him to trap an elephant. Hunger, whether for food or for the infinite, sets in motion
multiplicity and infinity of thought, and the sure hope of gaining a share of infinite power in
eternal life would lift most minds to effort.

He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and added nothing to his stock of
known forces for a very long time. The mass of nature exercised on him so feeble an attraction
that one can scarcely account for his apparent motion. Only a historian of very exceptional
knowledge would venture to say at what date between 3000 B.C. and 1900., the momentum of
Europe was greatest; but such progress as the world made consisted in economies of energy
rather than in its development; it was proved in mathematics, measured by names like
Archimedes, Aristarchus, Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law, measured by a number of names
which Adams had begun life by failing to learn; or in coinage,

A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 477

which was most beautiful near its beginning, and most barbarous at its close; or it was shown in
roads, or the size of ships, or harbors; or by the use of metals, instruments, and writing; all of
them economies of force, sometimes more forceful than the forces they helped; but the roads were
still travelled by the horse, the ass, the camel, or the slave; the ships were still propelled by sails or
oars; the lever, the spring, and the screw bounded the region of applied mechanics. Even the
metals were old.

Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural forces. Down to the year 300 of
the Christian era they were little changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more appa-
rently chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand years had educated society to feel the
vastness of Nature, and the infinity of her resources of power, but even this increase of attraction
had not yet caused economies in its methods of pursuit.

There the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the Emperor Diocletian abdicated;
and there it was that Adams broke down on the steps of Ara Cceli, his path blocked by the
scandalous failure of civilization at the moment it had achieved complete success. In the year 305
the empire had solved the problems of Europe more completely than they have ever been solved
since. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law, and Free Trade should, in four hundred years, have put
Europe far in advance of the point reached by modern society in the four hundred years since
1500, when conditions were less simple.

The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been incessant, but none suited Adams
unless it were the economic theory of adverse exchanges and exhaustion of minerals; but nations
are not ruined beyond a certain point by adverse exchanges, and Rome had by no means
exhausted her resources. On the contrary, the empire developed resources and energies quite
astounding. No other four hundred years of history before A.D. 1800 knew anything like it; and
although some of these developments, like the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts, and harbors,
were rather

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economies than force, yet in northwestern Europe alone the empire had developed three
energies--France, England, and Germany--competent to master the world. The trouble seemed
rather to be that the empire developed too much energy, and too fast.

A dynamic law
requires that two masses--nature and man--must go on, reacting upon each other, without stop,
as the sun and a comet react on each other, and that any appearance of stoppage is illusive. The
theory seems to exact excess, rather than deficiency, of action and reaction to account for the
dissolution of the Roman Empire, which should, as a problem of mechanics, have been torn to
pieces by acceleration. If the student means to try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he
must assign values to the forces of attraction that caused the trouble; and in this case he has them
in plain evidence. With the relentless logic that stamped Roman thought, the empire, which had
established unity on earth, could not help establishing unity in heaven. It was induced by its
dynamic necessities to economize the gods.

The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that Christianity ruined the empire,
and, with its usual force, has pointed out that its reforms alone saved the State. Any dynamic
theory gladly admits it. All it asks is to find and follow the force that attracts. The Church points
out this force in the Cross, and history needs only to follow it. The empire loudly asserted its mo-
tive. Good taste forbids saying that Constantine the Great speculated as audaciously as a modern
stock-broker on values of which he knew at the utmost only the volume; or that he merged all un-
certain forces into a single trust, which he enormously overcapitalized, and forced on the market;
but this is the substance of what Constantine himself said in his Edict of Milan in the year 313,
which admitted Christianity into the Trust of State Religions. Regarded as an Act of Congress, it
runs: "We have resolved to grant to Christians as well as all others the liberty to practice the
religion they prefer, in order that whatever exists of divinity or celestial power may help and favor
us and all who are under our

A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 479

government." The empire pursued power--not merely spiritual but physical--in the sense in which
Constantine issued his army order the year before, at the battle of the Milvian Bridge: In hoc
signo vinces! using the Cross as a train of artillery, which, to his mind, it was. Society
accepted it in the same character. Eighty years afterwards, Theodosius marched against his rival
Eugene with the Cross for physical champion; and Eugene raised the image of Hercules to fight
for the pagans; while society on both sides looked on, as though it were a boxing-match, to decide
a final test of force between the divine powers. The Church was powerless to raise the ideal. What
is now known as religion affected the mind of old society but little. The laity, the people, the
million, almost to a man, bet on the gods as they bet on a horse.

Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion disturbed economy, for even the
cost of heathen incense affected the exchanges; but no one could afford to buy or construct a
costly and complicated machine when he could hire an occult force at trifling expense.
Fetish-power was cheap and satisfactory, down to a certain point. Turgot and Auguste Comte
long ago fixed this stage of economy as a necessary phase of social education, and historians
seem now to accept it as the only gain yet made towards scientific history. Great numbers of
educated people--perhaps a majority--cling to the method still, and practice it more or less
strictly; but, until quite recently, no other was known.

480 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

The only occult power at man's disposal was fetish. Against it, no mechanical force could
compete except within narrow limits.

Outside of occult or fetish-power, the Roman world was incredibly poor. It knew but one
productive energy resembling a modern machine-the slave. No artificial force of serious value
was applied to production or transportation, and when society developed itself so rapidly in
political and social lines, it had no other means of keeping its economy on the same level than to
extend its slave-system and its fetish-system to the utmost.

The result might have been stated
in a mathematical formula as early as the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome fell.
The economic needs of a violently centralizing society forced the empire to enlarge its
slave-system until the slave-system consumed itself and the empire too, leaving society no
resource but further enlargement of its religious system in order to compensate for the losses and
horrors of the failure. For a vicious circle, its mathematical completeness approached perfection.
The dynamic law of attraction and reaction needed only a Newton to fix it in algebraic form.

At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden, agricultural, uncommercial Western
Empire-the poorer and less Christianized half-went to pieces. Society, though terribly shocked by
the horrors of Alaric's storm, felt still more deeply the disappointment in its new power, the
Cross, which had failed to protect its Church. The outcry against the Cross became so loud
among Christians that its literary champion, Bishop Augustine of Hippo-a town between Algiers
and Tunis-was led to write a famous treatise in defence of the Cross, familiar still to every
scholar, in which he defended feebly the mechanical value of the symbol-arguing only that pagan
symbols equally failed -but insisted on its spiritual value in the Civitas Dei which had taken
the place of the Civitas Romae in human interest. "Granted that we have lost all we had!
Have we lost faith? Have we lost piety? Have we lost the wealth of the inner man who is rich

A DYNAMTC THEORY OF HISTORY 481

before God? These are the wealth of Christians!" The Civitas Dei, in its turn, became the
sum of attraction for the Western world, though it also showed the same weakness in mechanics
that had wrecked the Civitas Romae. St. Augustine and his people perished at Hippo
towards 430, leaving society in appearance dull to new attraction.

Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of experimenting on occult force of every kind
is such as to absorb all the free thought of the human race. The gods did their work; history has
no quarrel with them; they led, educated, enlarged the mind; taught knowledge; betrayed
ignorance; stimulated effort. So little is known about the mind-whether social, racial, sexual or
heritable; whether material or spiritual; whether animal, vegetable or mineral-that history is
inclined to avoid it altogether; but nothing forbids one to admit, for convenience, that it may
assimilate food like the body, storing new force and growing, like a forest, with the storage. The
brain has not yet revealed its mysterious mechanism of gray matter. Never has Nature offered it so
violent a stimulant as when she opened to it the possibility of sharing infinite power in eternal life,
and it might well need a thousand years of prolonged and intense experiment to prove the value
of the motive. During these so-called Middle Ages, the Western mind reacted in many forms, on
many sides, expressing its motives in modes, such as Romanesque and Gothic architecture, glass
windows and mosaic walls, sculpture and poetry, war and love, which still affect some people as
the noblest work of man, so that, even to-day, great masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel
from far countries to look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo and Pisa, Assisi, Cordova,
Chartres, with vague notions about the force that created them, but with a certain surprise that a
social mind of such singular energy and unity should still lurk in their shadows.

The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the architecture of Sancta Sofia, but when
he does, he is distinctly con-

482 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

scious of forces not quite the same. Justinian has not the simplicity of Charlemagne. The Eastern
Empire showed an activity and variety of forces that classical Europe had never possessed. The
navy of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would have annihilated in half an hour any navy
that Carthage or Athens or Rome ever set afloat. The dynamic scheme began by asserting rather
recklessly that between the Pyramids (B,C, 3000), and the Cross (A.D. 300), no new force
affected Western progress, and antiquarians may easily dispute the fact; but in any case the motive
influence, old or new, which raised both Pyramids and Cross was the same attraction of power in
a future life that raised the dome of Sancta Soha and the Cathedral at Amiens, however much it
was altered, enlarged, or removed to distance in space. Therefore, no single event has more
puzzled historians than the sudden, unexplained appearance of at least two new natural forces of
the highest educational value in mechanics, for the first time within record of history. Literally,
these two forces seemed to drop from the sky at the precise moment when the Cross on one side
and the Crescent on the other, proclaimed the complete triumph of the Civitas Dei. Had
the Manichean doctrine of Good and Evil as rival deities been orthodox, it would alone have
accounted for this simultaneous victory of hostile powers.

Of the compass, as a step towards
demonstration of the dynamic law, one may confidently say that it proved, better than any other
force, the widening scope of the mind, since it widened immensely the range of contact between
nature and thought. The compass educated. This must prove itself as needing no proof.

Of Greek fire and gunpowder, the same thing cannot certainly be said, for they have the air of
accidents due to the attraction of religious motives. They belong to the spiritual world; or to the
doubtful ground of Magic which lay between Good and Evil. They were chemical forces, mostly
explosives, which acted and still act as the most violent educators ever known to man, but

A DYNAMTC THEORY OF HISTORY 483

they were justly feared as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may have risked towards the
milder teachers of his infancy, he was an abject pupil towards explosives. The Sieur de Joinville
left a record of the energy with which the relatively harmless Greek fire educated and enlarged the
French mind in a single night in the year 1249, when the crusaders were trying to advance on
Cairo. The good king St. Louis and all his staff dropped on their knees at every fiery flame that
flew by, praying-"God have pity on us!" and never had man more reason to call on his gods than
they, for the battle of religion between Christian and Saracen was trifling compared with that of
education between gunpowder and the Cross.

The fiction that society educated itself, or aimed at a conscious purpose, was upset by the
compass and gunpowder which dragged and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of
learning. At first, the apparent lag for want of volume in the new energies lasted one or two
centuries, which closed the great epochs of emotion by the Gothic cathedrals and scholastic
theology. The moment had Greek beauty and more than Greek unity, but it was brief; and for
another century or two, Western society seemed to float in space without apparent motion. Yet
the attractive mass of nature's energy continued to attract, and education became more rapid than
ever before. Society began to resist, but the individual showed greater and greater insistence,
without realizing what he was doing. When the Crescent drove the Cross in ignominy from
Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg and Fust were printing their first Bible at Mainz under the
impression that they were helping the Cross. When Columbus discovered the West Indies in ~492,
the Church looked on it as a victory of the Cross. When Luther and Calvin upset Europe half a
century later, they were trying, like St. Augustine, to substitute the Civitas Dei for the
Civitas Romae. When the Puritans set out for New England in 1620, they too were
looking to found a Civitas Dei in State Street; and when Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in
1678, he repeated St. Jerome. Even

484 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

when, after centuries of license, the Church reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned
Giordano Bruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630--as science goes on repeating to us
every day--it condemned anarchists, not atheists. None of the astronomers were irreligious men;
all of them made a point of magnifying God through his works; a form of science which did their
religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor
Newton, any more than Constantine the Great-if so much-doubted Unity. The utmost range of
their heresies reached only its personality.

This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of modern history. Except as reflected in
himself, man has no reason for assuming unity in the universe, or an ultimate substance, or a
prime-motor. The a priori insistence on this unity ended by fatigung the more active-or
reactive-minds; and Lord Bacon tried to stop it. He urged society to lay aside the idea of
evolving the universe from a thought, and to try evolving thought from the universe. The mind
should observe and register forces-take them apart and put them together-without assuming unity
at all. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." "The imagination must be given not wings
but weights." As Galileo reversed the action of earth and sun, Bacon reversed the relation of
thought to force. The mind was thenceforth to follow the movement of matter, and unity must be
left to shift for itself.

The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was as mechanical as the fall of a feather.
Man created nothing. After 1500, the speed of progress so rapidly surpassed man's gait as to
alarm every one, as though it were the acceleration of a falling body which the dynamic theory
takes it to be. Lord Bacon was as much astonished by it as the Church was, and with reason. Sud-
denly society felt itself dragged into situations altogether new and anarchic--situations which it
could not affect, but which painfully affected it. Instinct taught it that the universe in its thought
must be in danger when its reflection lost itself in space. The

A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 485

danger was all the greater because men of science covered it with "larger synthesis," and poets
called the undevout astronomer mad. Society knew better. Yet the telescope held it rigidly
standing on its head; the microscope revealed a universe that defied the senses; gunpowder killed
whole races that lagged behind; the compass coerced the most imbruted mariner to act on the
impossible idea that the earth was round; the press drenched Europe with anarchism. Europe saw
itself, violently resisting, wrenched into false positions, drawn along new lines as a fish that is
caught on a hook; but unable to understand by what force it was controlled. The resistance was
often bloody, sometimes humorous, always constant. Its contortions in the eighteenth century are
best studied in the wit of Voltaire, but all history and all philosophy from Montaigne and Pascal to
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche deal with nothing else; and still, throughout it all, the Baconian law
held good; thought did not evolve nature, but nature evolved thought. Not one considerable man
of science dared face the stream of thought; and the whole number of those who acted, like
Franklin, as electric conductors of the new forces from nature to man, down to the year 1800, did
not exceed a few score, confined to a few towns in western Europe. Asia refused to be touched
by the stream, and America, except for Franklin, stood outside.

Very slowly the accretion of
these new forces, chemical and mechanical, grew in volume until they acquired sufficient mass to
take the place of the old religious science, substituting their attraction for the attractions of the
Civitas Dei, but the process remained the same. Nature, not mind, did the work that the
sun does on the planets. Man depended more and more absolutely on forces other than his own,
and on instruments which superseded his senses. Bacon foretold it: "Neither the naked hand nor
the understanding, left to itself, can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is
done." Once done, the mind resumed its illusion, and society forgot its impotence; but no one
better than Bacon knew its tricks, and for his true followers science always meant self-

The success of this method staggers belief, and even to-day can be treated by history only as a
miracle of growth, like the sports of nature. Evidently a new variety of mind had appeared. Cer-
tain men merely held out their hands--like Newton, watched an apple; like Franklin, flew a kite;
like Watt, played with a tea-kettle--and great forces of nature stuck to them as though she were
playing ball. Governments did almost nothing but resist. Even gunpowder and ordnance, the great
weapon of government, showed little development between 1400 and 1800. Society was hostile
or indifferent, as Priestley and Jenner, and even Fulton, with reason complained in the most
advanced societies in the world, while its resistance became acute wherever the Church held
control; until all mankind seemed to draw itself out in a long series of groups, dragged on by an
attractive power in advance, which even the leaders obeyed without understanding, as the planets
obeyed gravity, or the trees obeyed heat and light.

The influx of new force was nearly spontaneous. The reaction of mind on the mass of nature
seemed not greater than that of a comet on the sun; and had the spontaneous influx of force
stopped in Europe, society must have stood still, or gone backward, as in Asia or Africa. Then
only economies of process would have counted as new force, and society would have been better
pleased; for the idea that new force must be in itself a good is only an animal or vegetable
instinct. As Nature developed her hidden energies, they tended to become destructive. Thought
itself became tortured, suffering reluctantly, impatiently, painfully, the coercion of new method.
Easy thought had always been movement of inertia, and mostly mere sentiment; but even the
processes of mathematics measured feebly the needs of force.

The stupendous acceleration
after 1800 ended in 1900 with the appearance of the new class of supersensual forces, before
which the

A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 487

man of science stood at first as bewildered and helpless as, in the fourth century, a priest of Isis
before the Cross of Christ.

This, then, or something like this, would be a dynamic formula of history. Any schoolboy knows
enough to object at once that it is the oldest and most universal of all theories. Church and State,
theology and philosophy, have always preached it, differing only in the allotment of energy
between nature and man. Whether the attractive energy has been called God or Nature, the
mechanism has been always the same, and history is not obliged to decide whether the Ultimate
tends to a purpose or not, or whether ultimate energy is one or many. Every one admits that the
will is a free force, habitually decided by motives. No one denies that motives exist adequate to
decide the will; even though it may not always be conscious of them. Science has proved that
forces, sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and complex, surround, traverse,
vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without stop; that man's senses are conscious of few, and only in a
partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic existence, his consciousness has been
induced, expanded, trained in the lines of his sensitiveness; and that the rise of his faculties from a
lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the function of
assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There is nothing unscientific in the idea that,
beyond the lines of force felt by the senses, the universe may be-as it has always been--either a
supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly attracts, and is either life or death to
penetrate. Thus far, religion, philosophy, and science seem to go hand in hand. The schools begin
their vital battle only there. In the earlier stages of progress, the forces to be assimilated were
simple and easy to absorb, but, as the mind of man enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of com-
plexity, and must continue to do so, even into chaos, until the reservoirs of sensuous or
supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease to affect him, or until he succumbs to their
excess.

For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer for a chart of relations, although
any serious student would need to invent another, to compare or correct its errors; but past
history is only a value of relation to the future, and this value is wholly one of convenience, which
can be tested only by experiment. Any law of movement must include, to make it a convenience,
some mechanical formula of acceleration.